Following closely upon the latter event came another war between France
and England, a conflict which, as in the reign of William and Mary,
renewed the hostilities between the French and English colonies in
America. At an early date, accordingly, the settlement of Deerfield
discovered that it was to be attacked by the French. At once measures
were taken to strengthen the fortifications of the town, and to prepare,
so far as possible, for the dreaded event.
The blow fell on the night of the twenty-ninth of February, 1704, when
Major Hertel de Rouville, with upwards of three hundred and forty French
and Indians, arrived at a pine bluff overlooking Deerfield meadow, about
two miles north of the village--a locality now known as Petty's Plain.
Here he halted, to await the appropriate hour for an attack, and it was
not until early morning that, leaving their packs upon the spot, his men
started forward for their terrible work of destruction. Rouville took
great pains not to alarm the sentinels in his approach, but the
precaution was unnecessary, as the watch were unfaithful, and had
retired to rest. Arriving at the fortifications, he found the snow
drifted nearly to the top of the palisades, and his entire party entered
the place undiscovered, while the whole population were in profound
sleep. Quietly distributing themselves in parties, they broke in the
doors of the houses, dragged out the astonished inhabitants, killed such
as resisted, and took prisoner the majority of the remainder, only a few
escaping from their hands into the woods.
[Illustration: WILLIAMS HOUSE, DEERFIELD, MASS.]
The house of Reverend John Williams was assaulted at the beginning of
the attack. Awakened from sleep, Mr. Williams leaped from his bed, and
running to the door found the enemy entering. Calling to two soldiers
who lodged in the house, he sprang back to his bedroom, seized a pistol,
cocked it, and presented it at the breast of an Indian who had followed
him. It missed fire, and it was well, for the room was thronged in an
instant, and he was seized, bound without being allowed the privilege of
dressing, and kept standing in the cold for an hour. Meanwhile, the
savages amused themselves by taunting him, swinging their hatchets over
him and threatening him. Two of his children and a negro woman were then
taken to the door and butchered. Mrs. Williams was allowed to dress, and
she and her five children were taken captives. Other houses in the
village were likewise attacked, one of them being defended by seven men,
for whom the women inside cast bullets while the fight was in progress.
But the attacking force was an overpowering one, and De Rouville and his
men had by sunrise done their work most successfully with torch and
tomahawk. The blood of forty-nine murdered men, women and children
reddened the snow. Twenty-nine men, twenty-four women, and fifty-eight
children were made captive, and in a few hours the spoil-encumbered
enemy were en route for Canada.
Through the midwinter snow which covered the fields the poor captives
marched out on their terrible pilgrimage. Two of the prisoners succeeded
in escaping, whereupon Mr. Williams was ordered to inform the others
that if any more slipped away death by fire would be visited upon those
who remained. The first night's lodgings were provided for as
comfortably as circumstances would permit, and all the ablebodied among
the prisoners were made to sleep in barns. On the second day's march Mr.
Williams was permitted to speak with his poor wife, whose youngest child
had been born only a few weeks before, and to assist her on her journey.
"On the way," says the pastor, in his famous book, "The Redeemed
Captive", "we discoursed on the happiness of those who had a right to an
house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens; and God for a father
and friend; as also it was our reasonable duty quietly to submit to the
will of God, and to say, 'The will of the Lord be done.'" Thus imparting
to one another their heroic courage and Christian strength and
consolation, the captive couple pursued their painful way.
At last the poor woman announced the gradual failure of her strength,
and during the short time she was allowed to remain with her husband,
expressed good wishes and prayers for him and her children. The
narrative proceeds: "She never spake any discontented word as to what
had befallen her, but with suitable expressions justified God in what
had happened.... We soon made a halt, in which time my chief surviving
master came up, upon which I was put into marching with the foremost,
and so made my last farewell of my dear wife, the desire of my eyes, and
companion in many mercies and afflictions. Upon our separation from
each other, we asked for each other grace sufficient for what God should
call us to."
For a short time Mrs. Williams remained where her husband had left her,
occupying her leisure in reading her Bible. He, as was necessary, went
on, and soon had to ford a small and rapid stream, and climb a high
mountain on its other side. Reaching the top very much exhausted, he was
unburdened of his pack. Then his heart went down the steep after his
wife. He entreated his master to let him go down and help her, but his
desire was refused. As the prisoners one after another came up he
inquired for her, and at length the news of her death was told to him.
In wading the river she had been thrown down by the water and entirely
submerged. Yet after great difficulty she had succeeded in reaching the
bank, and had penetrated to the foot of the mountain. Here, however,
her master had become discouraged with the idea of her maintaining the
march, and burying his tomahawk in her head he left her dead. Mrs.
Williams was the daughter of Reverend Eleazer Mather, the first minister
of Northampton--an educated, refined, and noble woman. It is pleasant,
while musing upon her sad fate, to recall that her body was found and
brought back to Deerfield, where, long years after, her husband was laid
by her side. And there to-day sleeps the dust of the pair beneath stones
which inform the stranger of the interesting spot.
Others of the captives were killed upon the journey as convenience
required. A journal kept by Stephen Williams, the pastor's son, who was
only eleven years old when captured, reflects in an artless way every
stage of the terrible journey: "They travelled," he writes, "as if they
meant to kill us all, for they travelled thirty-five or forty miles a
day.... Their manner was, if any loitered, to kill them. My feet were
very sore, so I thought they would kill me also."
When the first Sabbath arrived, Mr. Williams was allowed to preach. His
text was taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the verse in which
occurs the passage, "My virgins and my young men have gone into
captivity."
Thus they progressed, the life of the captives dependent in every case
upon their ability to keep up with the party. Here an innocent child
would be knocked upon the head and left in the snow, and there some poor
woman dropped by the way and killed by the tomahawk. Arriving at White
River, De Rouville divided his forces, and the parties took separate
routes to Canada. The group to which Mr. Williams was attached went up
White River, and proceeded, with various adventures, to Sorel in Canada,
to which place some of the captives had preceded him. In Canada, all who
arrived were treated by the French with great humanity, and Mr. Williams
with marked courtesy. He proceeded to Chambly, thence to St. Francis on
the St. Lawrence, afterward to Quebec, and at last to Montreal, where
Governor Vaudreuil accorded him much kindness, and eventually redeemed
him from savage hands.
Mr. Williams's religious experiences in Canada were characteristic of
the times. He was there thrown among Romanists, a sect against which he
entertained the most profound dislike--profound to the degree of
inflammatory conscientiousness, not to say bigotry. His Indian master
was determined he should go to church, but he would not, and was once
dragged there, where, he says, he "saw a great confusion instead of any
Gospel order." The Jesuits assailed him on every hand, and gave him but
little peace. His master at one time tried to make him kiss a crucifix,
under the threat that he would dash out his brains with a hatchet if he
should refuse. But he did refuse, and had the good fortune to save his
head as well as his conscience. Mr. Williams's own account of his stay
in Canada is chiefly devoted to anecdotes of the temptations to Romanism
with which he was beset by the Jesuits. His son Samuel was almost
persuaded to embrace the faith of Rome, and his daughter Eunice was, to
his great chagrin, forced to say prayers in Latin. But, for the most,
the Deerfield captives proved intractable, and were still aggressively
Protestant when, in 1706, Mr. Williams and all his children (except
Eunice, of whom we shall say more anon), together with the other
captives up to the number of fifty-seven, embarked on board a ship sent
to Quebec by Governor Dudley, and sailed for Boston.
A committee of the pastor's people met their old clergyman upon his
landing at Boston, and invited him to return to the charge from which he
had, nearly three years before, been torn. And Mr. Williams had the
courage to accept their offer, notwithstanding the fact that the war
continued with unabated bitterness. In 1707 the town voted to build him
a house "as big as Ensign Sheldon's, and a back room as big as may be
thought convenient." This house is still standing (1902), though Ensign
Sheldon's, the "Old Indian House in Deerfield," as it has been
popularly called, was destroyed more than half a century ago. The
Indian House stood at the northern end of Deerfield Common, and
exhibited to its latest day the marks of the tomahawk left upon its
front door in the attack of 1704, and the perforations made by the balls
inside. The door is still preserved, and is one of the most interesting
relics now to be seen in Memorial Hall, Deerfield.
For more than twenty years after his return from captivity, Mr. Williams
served his parish faithfully. He took into his new house a new wife, by
whom he had several children; and in this same house he passed
peacefully away June 12, 1729, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, and
the forty-fifth of his ministry.
Stephen Williams, who had been taken captive when a lad of eleven, was
redeemed in 1705 with his father. In spite of the hardships to which he
had been so early exposed, he was a fine strong boy when he returned to
Deerfield, and he went on with his rudely interrupted education to such
good effect that he graduated from Harvard in 1713 at the age of twenty.
In 1716 he settled as minister at Longmeadow, in which place he died in
1772. Yet his manhood was not passed without share in the wars of the
time, for he was chaplain in the Louisburg expedition in 1745, and in
the regiment of Colonel Ephraim Williams in his fatal campaign in 1755,
and again in the Canadian campaign of 1756. The portrait of him which is
here given was painted about 1748, and is now to be seen in the hall of
the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, within four-score rods of the
place where the boy captive was born, and from which he was carried as a
tender child into captivity.
[Illustration: REVEREND STEPHEN WILLIAMS.]
It has been said that one of the greatest trials of Mr. Williams's stay
in Canada was the discovery that his little daughter, Eunice, had been
taught by her Canadian captors to say prayers in Latin. But this was
only the beginning of the sorrow of the good man's life. Eunice was a
plastic little creature, and she soon adopted not only the religion, but
also the manners and customs of the Indians among whom she had fallen.
In fact and feeling she became a daughter of the Indians, and there
among them she married, on arriving at womanhood, an Indian by whom she
had a family of children. A few years after the war she made her first
visit to her Deerfield relatives, and subsequently she came twice to
Massachusetts dressed in Indian costume. But all the inducements held
out to her to remain there were in vain. During her last visit she was
the subject of many prayers and lengthy sermonising on the part of her
clerical relatives, an address delivered at Mansfield August 1, 1741, by
Solomon Williams, A. M., being frankly in her behalf. A portion of this
sermon has come down to us, and offers a curious example of the
eloquence of the time: "It has pleased God," says the worthy minister,
"to incline her, the last summer and now again of her own accord, to
make a visit to her friends; and this seems to encourage us to hope that
He designs to answer the many prayers which have been put up for her."
But in spite of these many prayers, and in spite, too, of the fact that
the General Court of Massachusetts granted Eunice and her family a piece
of land on condition that they would remain in New England, she refused
on the ground that it would endanger her soul. She lived and died in
savage life, though nominally a convert to Romanism. Out of her singular
fate has grown another romance, the marvel of later times. For from her
descended Reverend Eleazer Williams, missionary to the Indians at Green
Bay, Wisconsin, who was in 1851 visited by the Duc de Joinville, and
told that he was that Dauphin (son of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette),
who, according to history, died in prison June 9, 1795. In spite of the
fact that the evidence of this little prince's death was as strong as
any which can be found in history in relation to the death of Louis, his
father, or of Marie Antoinette, his mother, the strange story--first
published in _Putnam's Magazine_ for February, 1853--gained general
credence, even Mr. Williams himself coming gradually to believe it. As a
matter of fact, however, there was proved to be a discrepancy of eight
years between the dates of Williams's and the Dauphin's birth, and
nearly every part of the clergyman's life was found to have been spent
in quite a commonplace way. For as a boy, Eleazer Williams lived with
Reverend Mr. Ely, on the Connecticut River, and his kinsman, Doctor
Williams, of Deerfield, at once asserted that he remembered him very
well at all stages of his boyhood.
Governor Charles K. Williams, of Vermont, writing from Rutland under
date February 26, 1853, said of the Reverend Eleazer and his "claims" to
the throne of France, "I never had any doubt that Williams was of Indian
extraction, and a descendant of Eunice Williams. His father and mother
were both of them at my father's house, although I cannot ascertain
definitely the year. I consider the whole story a humbug, and believe
that it will be exploded in the course of a few months." As a matter of
fact, the story has been exploded,--though the features of the Reverend
Eleazer Williams, when in the full flush of manhood, certainly bore a
remarkable resemblance to those of the French kings from whom his
descent was claimed. His mixed blood might account for this, however.
Williams's paternal grandfather was an English physician,--not of the
Deerfield family at all,--and his grandmother the daughter of Eunice
Williams and her redskin mate. His father was Thomas Williams, captain
in the British service during the American Revolution, and his mother a
Frenchwoman. Thus the Reverend Eleazer was part English, part Yankee,
part Indian, and part French, a combination sufficiently complex to
account, perhaps, even for an unmistakably Bourbon chin.
NEW ENGLAND'S FIRST "CLUB WOMAN"
Even to-day, in this emancipated twentieth century, women ministers and
"female preachers" are not infrequently held up to derision by those who
delight to sit in the seat of the scornful. Trials for heresy are
likewise still common. It is not at all strange, therefore, that
Mistress Ann Hutchinson should, in 1636, have been driven out of Boston
as an enemy dangerous to public order, her specific offence being that
she maintained in her own house that a mere profession of faith could
not evidence salvation, unless the Spirit first revealed itself from
within.
Mrs. Hutchinson's maiden name was Ann Marbury, and she was the daughter
of a scholar and a theologian--one Francis Marbury--who was first a
minister of Lincolnshire and afterward of London. Naturally, much of the
girl's as well as the greater part of the woman's life was passed in the
society of ministers--men whom she soon learned to esteem more for what
they knew than for what they preached. Theology, indeed, was the
atmosphere in which she lived and moved and had her being.
Intellectually, she was an enthusiast, morally an agitator, a clever
leader, whom Winthrop very aptly described as a "woman of ready wit and
bold spirit."
While still young, this exceptionally gifted woman married William
Hutchinson, a country gentleman of good character and estate, whose
home was also in Lincolnshire. Winthrop has nothing but words of
contempt for Mrs. Hutchinson's husband, but there is little doubt that a
sincere attachment existed between the married pair, and that Hutchinson
was a man of sterling character and worth, even though he was
intellectually the inferior of his remarkable wife. In their
Lincolnshire home the Hutchinsons had been parishioners of the Reverend
John Cotton, and regular attendants at that celebrated divine's church
in Boston, England. To him, her pastor, Mrs. Hutchinson was deeply
attached. And when the minister fled to New England in order to escape
from the tyranny of the bishops, the Hutchinsons also decided to come to
America, and presently the whole family did so. Mrs. Hutchinson's
daughter, who had married the Reverend John Wright Wheelwright--another
Lincolnshire minister who had suffered at the hands of Archbishop
Laud--came with her mother. Besides the daughter, there were three grown
sons in the family at the time Mrs. Hutchinson landed in the Boston she
was afterward to rend with religious dissension.
So it was no young, sentimental, unbalanced girl, but a middle-aged,
matured, and experienced woman of the world who, in the autumn of 1634,
took sail for New England. During the voyage it was learned that Mrs.
Hutchinson came primed for religious controversy. With some Puritan
ministers who were on the same vessel she discussed eagerly abstruse
theological questions, and she hinted in no uncertain way that when they
should arrive in New England they might expect to hear more from her.
Clearly, she regarded herself as one with a mission. In unmistakable
terms she avowed her belief that direct revelations are made to the
elect, and asserted that nothing of importance had ever happened to her
which had not been revealed to her beforehand.
Upon their arrival in Boston, the Hutchinsons settled down in a house on
the site of the present Old Corner Book Store, the head of the family
made arrangements to enter upon his business affairs, and in due time
both husband and wife made their application to be received as members
of the church. This step was indispensable to admit the pair into
Christian fellowship and to allow to Mr. Hutchinson the privileges of a
citizen. He came through the questioning more easily than did his wife,
for, in consequence of the reports already spread concerning her
extravagant opinions, Mrs. Hutchinson was subjected to a most
searching examination. Finally, however, she, too, passed through the
ordeal safely, the examining ministers, one of whom was her old and
beloved pastor, Mr. Cotton, declaring themselves satisfied with her
answers. So, in November, we find her a "member in good standing" of the
Boston church.
[Illustration: OLD CORNER BOOKSTORE, SITE OF THE HUTCHINSON HOUSE.]
From this time forward Mrs. Hutchinson was a person of great importance
in Boston. Sir Harry Vane, then governor of the colony and the idol of
the people, was pleased, with Mr. Cotton, to take much notice of the
gifted newcomer, and their example was followed by the leading and
influential people of the town, who treated her with much consideration
and respect, and were quick to recognise her intellectuality as far
superior to that of most members of her sex. Mrs. Hutchinson soon came,
indeed, to be that very remarkable thing--a prophet honoured in her own
community. Adopting an established custom of the town, she held in her
own home two weekly meetings--one for men and women and one exclusively
for women--at which she was the oracle. And all these meetings were very
generously attended.
Mrs. Hutchinson seems to have been New England's first clubwoman. Never
before had women come together for independent thought and action. To be
sure, nothing more lively than the sermon preached the Sunday before was
ever discussed at these gatherings, but the talk was always pithy and
bright, the leader's wit was always ready, and soon the house at the
corner of what is now School Street came to be widely celebrated as the
centre of an influence so strong and far-reaching as to make the very
ministers jealous and fearful. At first, to be sure, the parsons
themselves went to the meetings. Cotton, Vane, Wheelwright, and
Coddington, completely embraced the leader's views, and the result upon
Winthrop of attendance at these conferences was to send that official
home to his closet, wrestling with himself, yet more than half
persuaded.
Hawthorne's genius has conjured up the scene at Boston's first "parlour
talks," so that we too may attend and be one among the "crowd of hooded
women and men in steeple hats and close-cropped hair ... assembled at
the door and open windows of a house newly-built. An earnest expression
glows in every face ... and some press inward as if the bread of life
were to be dealt forth, and they feared to lose their share."
In plain English Ann Hutchinson's doctrines were these: "She held and
advocated as the highest truth," writes Mr. Drake, "that a person could
be justified only by an actual and manifest revelation of the Spirit to
him personally. There could be no other evidence of grace. She
repudiated a doctrine of works, and she denied that holiness of living
alone could be received as evidence of regeneration, since hypocrites
might live outwardly as pure lives as the saints do. The Puritan
churches held that sanctification by the will was evidence of
justification." In advancing these views, Mrs. Hutchinson's pronounced
personal magnetism stood her in good stead. She made many converts, and,
believing herself inspired to do a certain work, and emboldened by the
increasing number of her followers, she soon became unwisely and
unpleasantly aggressive in her criticisms of those ministers who
preached a covenant of works. She seems to have been led into speaking
her mind as to doctrines and persons more freely than was consistent
with prudence and moderation, because she was altogether unsuspicious
that what was being said in the privacy of her own house was being
carefully treasured up against her. So she constantly added fuel to the
flame, which was soon to burst forth to her undoing.
She was accused of fostering sedition in the church, and was then
confronted with charges relative to the meetings of women held at her
house. This she successfully parried.
It looked indeed as if she would surely be acquitted, when by an
impassioned discourse upon special revelations that had come to her, and
an assertion that God would miraculously protect her whatever the court
might decree, she impugned the position of her judges and roused keen
resentment. Because of this it was that she was banished "as unfit for
our society." In the colony records of Massachusetts the sentence
pronounced reads as follows: "Mrs. Hutchinson (the wife of Mr. William
Hutchinson) being convented for traducing the ministers and their
ministry in this country, shee declared voluntarily her revelations for
her ground, and that shee should bee delivred and the Court ruined with
their posterity; and thereupon was banished, and the meanwhile she was
committed to Mr. Joseph Weld untill the Court shall dispose of her."